Product description

In the spring of 1914, a group of students at the Slade School of Art have gathered for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant is easily distracted by an intriguing fellow student, Elinor Brooke, but watches from afar when a well-known painter catches her eye. After World War I begins, Paul tends to the dying soldiers from the front line as a Belgian Red Cross volunteer, but the longer he remains, the greater the distance between him and home becomes. By the time he returns, Paul must confront not only the overwhelming, perhaps impossible challenge of how to express all that he has seen and experienced, but also the fact that life, and love, will never be the same for him again.

Author information

Pat Barker is the author of the highly acclaimed Regeneration""trilogy: Regeneration; The Eye in the Door, winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize; and The Ghost Road, winner of the Booker Prize; as well as seven other novels. She lives in England.

Review quote

Advance Praise for "Life Class":
"This is a story about hopeful ambitions and relationships redirected and reshaped by a climate of catastrophic change....[It] render[s] the horrors of combat with (Barker's trademark) meticulously researched detail and piercing clarity. Secondary characters' experiences likewise amplify into lucid microcosms of the global cataclysm that shadows every individual life....Mature, unsentimental and searching. One of this excellent writer's finest books." --"Kirkus Reviews" (starred)
"With great tenderness and insight, and a daring to forgo simple resolutions, Barker conveys a wartime world turned upside down." --Mark Bostridge, "The Independent"
"As ever with Barker...the writing is breathtaking...sharply written and elegantly constructed." --D. J. Taylor, "The Guardian"
Praise for The Regeneration Trilogy:
"A masterwork...complex and ambitious." --"New York Times Book Review
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"It has been Pat Barker's accomplishment to enlarge the scope of the contemporary English novel." --"The New Yorker
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"A literary achievement...remarkable." --"San Francisco Chronicle
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"Some of the most powerful antiwar writing in modern fiction." --"Boston Globe"